Subtitles not working - RESOLVED

Duplicate post as I accidentally filed under “General Discussions (Plex Pass)” and couldn’t figure out how to move to “General Discussions (Public)” so simply made a second post.

After upgrading to 1.x subtitles stopped working for newly added Movies and TV Series. Any TV Series that already existed the new episodes subtitles would work. Subtitles would display as “None” and PMS would not recognize any external subtitle files even though there were ones in the same directory, named correctly and encoded properly with UTF-8.

I read for hours and for the most part couldn’t find anything that helped. External SRT files were all encoded UTF-8 and named identical to the video file. There were no special characters in the directory or file names.

Then I cam across one thread where a user simply moved the offending Movies or TV Series outside and then back into their library.

My issues was definitely a bug within PMS. It has been over a week and I have had new Movies, TV Series and TV Episodes all added and external SRT subtitles files work perfectly. All I did was:

1. Moved 100% of the subdirectories under my top level Movies directory to another hard drive not tracked by Plex
2. Moved 100% of the subdirectories under my top level TV Shows directory to another hard drive not tracked by Plex
3. Performed a “Refresh All” for both Movies and TV Shows where at this point I had nothing showing in Plex under those libraries.
4. Absolutely nothing was changed within properties/settings
5. Copied the Movies subdirectories back under the top level Movies directory
6. Copied the TV Shows subdirectories back under the top level TV Shows directory
7. Performed a “Refresh All” for both Movies and TV Shows where at this point I had everything showing
8. Confirmed that PMS could see all external SRT files for any Movies or TV Series that I knew were not working.

There are dozens if not 100s of threads on subtitles pointing to encoding issues of external subtitle files, improper naming of external SRT files not matching the video source, hidden characters in directory or file names or any number of other possible issues.

For me, and likely many others, there was absolutely nothing wrong with my external SRT files either encoding or naming, no hidden characters or nothing wrong with my PMS configuration. I must have hit a bug within PMS that simply halted any new Movies or TV Series to properly recognize external subtitle files which in my case are usually SRT but not always.

Keeping the same version of PMS, changing nothing within the properties settings and simply moving the folders outside, Refresh All, moving them back, Refresh ALL has completely resolved my subtitles issues and appears to be resolved from this point moving forward.

Sorry but I couldn’t find the original thread that gave me the idea to try the above sequence to solve my issues. There simply are over 1k individual threads on subtitles and although I tried, I was unable to locate the original thread that gave me the idea.

I have created this thread in hopes that this may help others experiencing issues with subtitles. This might resolve the issues for some folks having continued subtitle issues that so far cannot be explained and no other recommendations have resolved their issues.

Thank you for posting this. I think I have had the same problem. I will try your fix soon.

If it helps anyone in diagnosing it, I was skimming through episodes to check and it appeared that those where the subtitles were detected also seemed to be those that identify a language for the audio as well. Whereas those episodes I have where the audio is marked “Unknown (AC3 5.1)” won’t detect the .srt files.

This also now seems to be fixed for me with the latest (1.4.2.3400) update, though I see no mention of it in the changelog.

After updating to 1.8.4.4249, external .srt subtitle files stopped working.
Spent a couple of days on the various forums and discussions, uninstalls, reinstalls, reload files, etc. with no luck.
Gave up went to Kodi where all worked great, but Kodi won’t cast.
Decided to try some random trial and error Plex Settings, one of which fixed my problem.
Maybe it will fix yours.

Settings>Web>Player>Burn Subtitles (switched from the default, “Automatic” to “Always”)

Subtitles all work perfectly for now.

dixichuk

Tried your fix when i sourced dothraki to english subtitles for game of thrones that wouldnt work. Your fix worked a treat thanks

Settings>Web>Player>Burn Subtitles (switched from the default, “Automatic” to “Always”)

Thanks for this information, but I randomly get this issues when I add new movies or series. Moving my entire collection back and forth doesn’t really sound like a great solution, especially when you also have lots of 4K movies. A one time effort is something I can live with, but multiple times a year is pretty annoying. I hoped that an upgrade of PMS would fix this, but still today I still get srt files not working in plex. SRT files that are coded as UTF-8 and correctly named, even with “forced”. Such a strange and very annoying bug!

I found using the subtitle manager in the plex webtool was very helpful as for each show I could see the sidecar (downloaded) subtitles and the agent acquired subtitles, preview and get rid of the ones that I didn’t want. tool is available at: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/119940/webtool-subtitle-manager-development

Just wanted to add that I was having issues with Plex recognizing subtitles - tried all of the other suggestions (save as UTF-8, double-check file names, play with Agent settings) and none of it worked. Then I tried this - except I didn’t move the files to another hard drive - I just moved them to a folder on the same hard drive that I hadn’t told Plex about and that seemed to do the trick! I moved everything, scanned, and when Plex was “empty” I then moved everything back and scanned again. One test movie that kept showing Subtitles None now shows subtitles!

Still have to wait for Plex to finish scanning 1.5 TB of files, which is taking a good couple hours, so like OP mentioned, not something you want to do regularly.

Fixed the problem, thank you!